Printing and publishing

The announcement, yesterday, that Borders Books was making its long-foreseen move into bankruptcy got me thinking. The most frequent charge made against Borders' long-term management team was that they'd been too slow to move into online sales and e-books. The charge I heard next most often was that they'd also neglected the college bookstore market.

I'm not sure how valid the online/e-book argument is. Not that it doesn't have a certain intuitive logic to it, but I'm not sure how well that logic stands up under scrutiny. After all, Borders's strength has always been their big-box stores, and no other company has yet managed to integrate online and real-world book sales at all seamlessly. Barnes & Noble, perhaps Borders' closest traditional competitor, has a strong online presence but their online operation and their operation in physical reality are really quite separate (at least from a customer's perspective). And Amazon -- the obvious competition originating in the virtual world -- has never established a physical sales presence. In fact, Amazon has grown by expanding the "book" term in "online book sales", not the "online" term. As much as I'd like to think that bricks-and-mortar bookstores have a future, I don't think that's the way to bet.

And that includes campus bookstores (near and dear to many of our hearts). At Greenback U., the bookstore operation is diversifying its stock rapidly because textbook sales (and, indeed, book sales in general) are way down. That's hardly surprising, given the notoriously high cost of textbooks and the relative prevalence of bogus "new editions" (a handful of revised pages in an otherwise unchanged tome) clearly designed primarily to make used copies of earlier editions nominally obsolete. Given that sort of reputation, it's no surprise that more and more professors are assigning readings rather than texts, and making the readings available as online PDFs.

I wish I could say that providing class readings in electronic, rather than physical, form was helping to reduce campus un-sustainability, but it's really not (or, at least, not much). The simple truth of the matter is that most students, assigned a reading which is provided in PDF form, will themselves print the thing off. Many people find that paper is easier on the eyes than are computer screens. And paper copies are easier to make notes on, and to highlight. Additionally (at least at Greenback), more professors are banning the use of laptop computers in classrooms. To an extent I can sympathize (after all, faculty are more important than Facebook (boy, am I going to get in trouble for making that statement!)), but the direct result is that students need printouts to reference in class.

So what we're seeing is the latest step in a path that started with professionally printed texts produced in large quantities (books), morphed through semi-professionally printed texts ("readers") produced in small quantities at campus copy centers, and has ended with individually-produced texts printed by each student either on a university-provided printer or on their own small printer in their dorm room or home.

Students using their own printers is environmentally undesirable, because small printers are less efficient (in terms of energy and toner usage) than industrial-scale ones.

And students using university-supplied printers creates a problem at schools (like Greenback) where each student gets assigned a print quota. Those quotas were created back in the days when students printed out papers they'd (ostensibly) written themselves, not their entire list of readings for the semester. Reality has changed, but campus administration hasn't kept up.

Or, maybe they have. Maybe print quotas are being intentionally kept rather small. Maybe student print charges for exceeding their quotas are intended to make up for reduced profits from the campus bookstore operation. After all, universities need to be economically sustainable, too! <grin>